A slim majority of Israeli teenagers don't know what the Oslo Accords were, according to a recent poll. They don't think a negotiated settlement with Palestinians is possible. They are the failure of the generations before them. And they all do compulsory military service, just like this book's main characters, three young female friends who grow up in a dull, peripheral town in today's Israel, then join the army, where they are really bored. To mitigate boredom one of the many features of army life for which they are hopelessly unprepared they imagine a lot of outlandish scenarios. Also, being late teenagers, they flirt with boys and fret about the future and sometimes they harass and humiliate Palestinians at checkpoints, just to pass the time. Effusively praised, this first novel was picked up for translation into 22 languages when it was a just-commissioned promise based on a string of short stories. Some of those stories ran in the New Yorker and Vice magazine, and made 25-year-old Shani Boianjiu the youngest recipient of the US National Book Foundation's 5 under 35 award. The novel has also been longlisted for the Women's fiction prize.
The book has that contradictory impulse of much army fiction, in which compulsory military service is depicted as brutalising a nation's young adults (what it does to those living under military occupation is not in the frame), as well as an elevating rites-of-passage. The girls come from a flimsy insult of a village on Israel's border with Lebanon, one of those into which non-European Jews were dumped and left to deal with it. Lea ends up serving at West Bank checkpoints, letting Palestinians into Israel the ones with permits "that assured they weren't the type likely to stay in Israel for ever or try to kill us".Bored, she invents life stories for one of these crumpled Palestinian men until the real version slices open the neck of one of her checkpoint colleagues. Avishag is stationed on the Egyptian Sinai border, where her job is to watch illegal people, porn and pirated films that try to enter Israel. Yael, meanwhile, is a weapons instructor, teaching boys barely younger than her to shoot better.
This is all told in a clipped, off-key style. Boianjiu wrote the novel in English but translated the Hebrew phraseology literally: initially the prose seems charmingly stilted, but soon it starts to grate like a bad translation. That's when you wish that the author had had a less indulgent editor, because there is so much good writing here: memorable detail and sharp storytelling that often gets lost amid the bad metaphors and narrative drag.
The parts that stand out are surreal comic set pieces in the vein of Catch-22, for which Boianjiu has obvious flair. One involves a group of Palestinian protesters inviting Israeli checkpoint soldiers to crack open their box of "means of suppressing demonstrations" different, escalating weaponry used for crowd dispersal. The Palestinians ask for this so that their mini-demo gets newspaper column inches. Other scenes, with expert comic timing, relay Yael's amusement at the audacity of Palestinian kids who remove bits of an Israeli army base in the West Bank kit, signs, the periphery fencing while the base is guarded round the clock.
The story's political framework is located within the mindset of the Israeli army. Some readers have found irony in Boianjiu's narrative; others will just find it uncomfortable. It captures well the dissonance of a transition into womanhood that must take place within the fear-soaked tedium of compulsory military service. But for me, the narrative feels more like a succession of vignettes it isn't strong enough to make me care about the characters, or carry the book through to its end.
Rachel Shabi's Not the Enemy: Israel's Jews from Arab Lands is published by Yale.
